The Origins of the Tour de France: A Century-Defining Race Born to Save a Newspaper's Circulation

A Nearly Bankrupt Newspaper Gave Birth to Cycling’s Most Important Race

For most cycling fans, hearing “Tour de France” conjures images of sprints down the Champs-Élysées, the brutal climbs of the Alps and the Pyrenees, and the yellow jersey every rider in the world dreams of wearing. But trace the race back to its origins, and you’ll find the Tour de France was never really born from a “sporting ideal”—it was a byproduct of a commercial survival battle. Most sources indicate the Tour de France was founded in 1903, driven by the French sports newspaper L’Auto (later renamed L’Équipe). At the time, the paper was locked in a fight for its very existence, and the Tour de France was the crucial card it played.

Understanding this commercial backdrop offers a completely different lens on the Tour de France: from the very start, it didn’t exist “purely to crown the strongest rider,” but was designed as a massive marketing campaign to “get more people to buy the newspaper and get more people talking about it.” This origin story profoundly shaped the Tour’s race-format logic for over a century—it had to be dramatic enough, twisty enough, and controversial enough to keep selling papers, keep drawing roadside crowds, and later keep television audiences hooked.

The Battlefield of French Sports Journalism in the Late 19th Century

From the late 19th century into the early 20th, competition among French sports newspapers was fierce, and one major rival was Le Vélo. At the time, Le Vélo was France’s highest-circulation, most influential sports paper, covering cycling, horse racing, motor racing, boxing, and more, while maintaining close ties with many sponsors in the cycling and automobile industries.

That sponsor relationship eventually cracked. Most sources indicate that editorial positions at Le Vélo clashed politically or commercially with certain key advertisers (including figures from the automobile and cycling parts industries), leading those advertisers and associates to break away and fund a new rival paper: L’Auto. The new paper recruited journalist, veteran cyclist, and track athlete Henri Desgrange as its editor. Desgrange was himself a cycling enthusiast and record-holder, and his understanding of the sport—along with his instinct for packaging athletic events in dramatic narrative—would later prove essential to the Tour’s birth.

However, L’Auto’s early sales were poor, far behind rival Le Vélo. The paper urgently needed something to dramatically boost circulation while keeping readers following along daily for weeks. Under that pressure, the story goes, during an editorial lunch or meeting, someone inside the paper proposed “holding a long-distance cycling race spanning all of France”—using the race’s daily progress to force readers to buy the paper every day for the latest updates, thereby steadily lifting circulation.

Why the Extreme “Loop Around All of France” Format?

Before the Tour de France, Europe already had long-distance intercity cycling races; France, Belgium, and Italy all had traditions of long one-day races (which later evolved into today’s “classics”). But the idea of “spanning several weeks, split into multiple stages, looping around an entire country” was a bold and unprecedented gamble at the time.

The commercial logic behind the design was actually quite straightforward:

• Sustained news hooks: Splitting the race into multiple stages meant the paper could publish fresh race reports every single day for weeks, rather than a one-day race where “the story ends when the day ends.”
• Maximized geographic reach: The route crossed major French cities, spreading the paper’s potential readership nationwide, not just around Paris.
• Drama and suspense: A multi-stage race naturally produces overall-standings reversals, unexpected punctures, physical collapses, and other storylines—inherently as gripping as a serialized novel.

This mindset of “running a sporting event as serialized storytelling” was precisely Desgrange’s professional instinct as a journalist, and it persists to this day—modern Tour de France daily post-race coverage, rider interviews, and the dramatized packaging of mountain showdowns are essentially extensions of the same logic.

The First Tour de France: A Massive Gap in Scale, Format, and Modernity

Stage Count and Distance: A Patchwork of Long, Few “Giant One-Day Races”

Most sources indicate the inaugural 1903 Tour de France took place that summer, split into just six stages—far fewer than the modern Tour’s usual twenty-plus. But because there were so few stages, each one stretched to extreme lengths, with individual stages often requiring riders to pedal for over a dozen hours, sometimes crossing from daylight into the dead of night. This format demanded a level of physical endurance, willpower, and resistance to sleep deprivation completely at odds with the modern Tour’s logic of “shorter stages and more consistent recovery time.”

Below is a simplified comparison of the main format differences between the first Tour and the modern Tour, so readers can grasp at a glance how the race has evolved over a century:

As this table shows, the first Tour de France was closer to an “extreme endurance survival test” than the highly organized, tactically choreographed team competition we know today. Many participants back then were so-called “isolés” (lone wolves) with no team support, forced to handle punctures, mechanical failures, and refueling entirely on their own. Rules even strictly limited assistance from outsiders (including teammates), and violations could bring severe penalties or disqualification.

The Brutality of the Early Tours

Most sources note that early Tours featured grueling conditions: roads were largely unpaved, rough and strewn with gravel, and bike mechanical reliability was nowhere near today’s standards. Punctures, broken chains, and damaged frames were constant. Riders had to carry spare parts and fix their own bikes—a stark contrast to the modern image of team cars trailing behind, ready to offer full-service support at a moment’s notice.

Additionally, the first and early editions of the Tour were plagued by cheating controversies: some riders were accused of sneaking part of the route by train or car, or sabotaging rivals’ tires with tacks. Ironically, these scandals only boosted the race’s notoriety, which to some degree aligned with the original goal of “generating buzz to drive newspaper sales”—even negative news is still news.

The Shift from Points-Based to Total-Time Classification

Worth noting: in the Tour’s early development, the overall classification didn’t start with the “rider with the lowest total time wins” system. Early on, a points-based ranking was used, where riders earned points based on each stage’s finishing position, and the overall winner was determined by total points at the end—a different concept from the total-time system familiar today. The organizers later concluded that total time better reflected overall strength and fairness, gradually shifting to the cumulative-time format that remains in use. This reminds us that the Tour’s rules were never a perfect, finalized blueprint from day one; they evolved through years of revision and trial-and-error into the format we know today.

From Marketing Gimmick to National Cultural Institution

The Explosive Growth in Newspaper Sales

The original purpose behind the founding of the Tour de France was to boost the circulation of L’Auto newspaper, and most sources indicate that this goal was indeed achieved—newspaper sales saw significant growth during the race period, which even helped L’Auto gradually gain a firm footing in its competition with rival paper Le Vélo, eventually leading to the rival’s closure. This commercial experiment of “saving a newspaper with a sporting event” can be described as a highly representative success story in the history of sports marketing.

After the event’s success, Desgrange himself took the opportunity to establish the Tour de France as an annual fixed spectacle, and over the following decades, he continued to serve as the event’s dominant figure and rule-maker, constantly adjusting the format, adding mountain stages, and introducing elements such as team involvement. Step by step, he elevated the Tour de France from a “newspaper marketing campaign” to the status of a “national cultural event.”

The Historical Logic Behind the Tour de France Route Design: Why Circle Around France?

From its inception, the route design of the Tour de France carried a strong sense of a “national tour”—by having the race route traverse all major regions and cities of France, the event itself became a medium for consolidating national identity and showcasing local scenery. This design philosophy, to some extent, echoed the prevailing atmosphere in Europe at the time, where nations used sporting events to foster national consciousness. As the event grew in scale, the Tour gradually incorporated more mountain sections, especially the climbing stages in the Alps and the Pyrenees. These high-mountain stages later became the decisive battleground for determining the overall winner and remain one of the Tour’s most dramatic and spectator-friendly core attractions.

For Taiwanese readers, one might use the imagery of long climbs like Wuling (Provincial Highway 14甲, the highest point on Taiwan’s road network, at approximately 3,275 meters above sea level) to imagine the ultimate test of physical endurance and mental fortitude that the Tour’s mountain stages impose on riders—long durations, high altitude, and steep, fluctuating gradients are a severe challenge to both cardiovascular capacity and muscular strength. To a certain extent, the Tour’s mountain stages magnify this extreme climbing experience to a scale spanning multiple consecutive days and crossing numerous mountain passes.

Desgrange’s Race Philosophy: Suffering Itself Is the Selling Point

To understand why the Tour de France evolved into an almost cruel test of riders’ physical and mental limits, one must examine the race philosophy of Desgrange, the editor-in-chief and race founder. Most sources indicate that Desgrange held an almost romanticized attitude toward “suffering” and “struggle.” He believed that for a truly great race, the ideal outcome would be that only a very few—or perhaps even just a single rider—could make it to the finish. The difficulty of the race itself was the selling point, and the riders’ pain and agony were precisely the dramatic tension readers wanted to see in the newspaper. From today’s perspective on sports ethics, this mindset seems quite extreme, but placed within the context of the early 20th century, it was an extension of the “heroic narrative” widely championed by the sports journalism of the era—riders were not just competitors but were shaped by the press into almost mythological figures of “suffering heroes.”

This philosophy was directly reflected in the early Tour’s rule design: strict prohibition of outside assistance, requiring riders to handle mechanical failures themselves, and deliberately arranging ultra-long distances and overnight stages. To a certain extent, these were all deliberate means of “deepening the riders’ suffering” to increase narrative tension. Desgrange even publicly stated on multiple occasions that if the race became too easy and too many people could finish, it would be a sign of failure in the race’s design. This almost austere approach to organizing the race also meant that in the first few editions of the Tour, the abandonment rate was consistently high, and only a minority of riders typically completed the full course.

It is worth noting that this mindset of “selling suffering” was not a personal quirk unique to Desgrange but was closely tied to the cultural imagination of “willpower” and “masculinity” prevalent in European society at the time—the ultimate ordeal of endurance sports was seen as a stage for displaying individual character and spiritual strength. This cultural backdrop is also a crucial clue for understanding why the early Tour de France featured such extreme race formats.

The Addition of Mountain Stages: From Flat Circuits to the “Circle of Death”

The Tour de France’s original route design actually relied heavily on flat and hilly terrain, with no special arrangement for high-mountain stages. Most sources indicate that the organizers gradually experimented with adding mountain sections within the first few editions after the founding. Initially, these were relatively lower-altitude, gentler mountain areas, intended not only to add topographical variety to the race but also to test the differences in riders’ performance on climbing terrain, ensuring that race results were no longer determined solely by flatland sprinting ability.

As the race was adjusted year after year, the Tour successively incorporated the Alps and the Pyrenees into its route. At the time, these mountain roads were mostly primitive in condition with treacherous curves, and riders often had to struggle upward on gravel roads without asphalt paving. Some legendary high-mountain sections, due to the severity of their gradients and harsh environment, were even dubbed with nicknames like the “Circle of Death” by the media and riders, used to describe the extreme physical and mental torment of consecutively crossing multiple high peaks. Once these mountain stages were included in the race program, they quickly became the decisive battleground for the overall title, transforming the Tour from a race purely about flatland endurance and sprint speed into a comprehensive endurance event combining climbing ability and overall tactical planning. To some extent, this transformation process laid the foundation for the Tour’s basic narrative structure over the following century: “mountain battles decide the overall champion.”

In comparison with Taiwan’s long climbing routes, the sustained ascents and gradient variations found on roads like Wuling (Provincial Highway 14甲), Fengguizui, the Beiyi Highway, the Yangjin P-word Mountain Road, and Taroko can give everyday cyclists a preliminary sense of “the draining effect of continuous climbing on body and mind”—although the distance and altitude scale cannot be directly compared to the high-mountain stages of the Alps, the feeling of rising altitude, dropping perceived temperature, and being forced to adjust one’s breathing rhythm is actually a practical reference point for understanding the struggles of professional riders on mountain stages.

Through Wars and Controversies: How the Tour de France Survived Over a Century

Since its founding, the Tour de France has not been held smoothly every year. Most sources indicate that the race was suspended several times in its history due to the two World Wars, only resuming after the wars ended. During these suspensions, not only was the race itself interrupted, but many individuals who had participated in or organized the event were also directly caught up in the turmoil of war. The Tour’s history is therefore closely intertwined with the major political events of 20th-century Europe, rather than being a mere chronological record of a sporting event.

Beyond the suspensions caused by war, the Tour also experienced numerous rule changes, sponsorship controversies, power struggles between riders and organizers, and the highly publicized doping scandals in its subsequent decades of development. To some extent, these challenges tested the institutional resilience of the event—it had to continuously adjust rules, strengthen testing mechanisms, and win back public trust in order to maintain the credibility and topical appeal befitting a century-old race. From this perspective, the Tour’s survival to this day relies not only on the original marketing masterstroke that saved newspaper sales but also on the cumulative results of the organizers’ sustained efforts over an entire century to adapt to the challenges of each era and continuously refine the system.

The Essential Differences Between the Modern Tour and Its Founding Era

From “Lone Wolves” to “Team Tactics”

If one were to name the greatest structural transformation in the Tour’s century-long history, it would perhaps be the evolution from “primarily individual participation” to “professional team warfare.” Although the early Tour did have categories (such as sponsored team groups and independent lone-wolf riders), overall, riders relied more on personal physical ability and willpower to endure the long race. In contrast, the modern Tour is a highly organized team-tactical competition, with extremely refined divisions of labor such as pace-setting, drafting, mountain domestiques, and sprint trains. The logistical support provided by teams (food, water, spare wheels, tactical communication) is also far beyond what the early era could compare with.

From Newspaper Reports to Global Live Broadcasts

In the early Tour, information dissemination relied entirely on newspaper reports published the next day; readers had to wait until the following day to learn what had happened the day before. The modern Tour, however, uses television broadcasts, online streaming, and social media to allow cycling fans worldwide to follow the race in real time, even seeing live data such as riders’ heart rates and wattage output. This evolution in communication methods, to some extent, continues the Tour’s DNA of valuing “narrative tension” and “topic management” that has existed since its founding—only the medium has changed from newspapers to screens.

Humanized Adjustments to the Race Format

In the early days of the Tour de France, the demands on riders were almost brutal, with riders often required to ride continuously for over ten hours or even through the night, and the rules prohibiting outside assistance were also quite stringent. With the development of sports science and awareness of riders’ rights, the stage designs of the modern Tour de France are relatively more “reasonable,” taking into account riders’ recovery needs, scheduling rest days, and regulating the scope of legal assistance in feed zones. This also reflects a shift in the overall sports industry from “purely creating spectacle” toward “balancing competitive fairness with athlete health.”

The table below summarizes the transformation of the Tour de France’s role from its founding purpose to its modern positioning, helping readers more systematically understand the evolution of this event:

Lessons from the Origin Story of the Tour de France

The origin story of the Tour de France actually offers a very interesting perspective that allows us to rethink “how a great sporting event is created.” It wasn’t that a group of idealists first wanted to promote cycling and then gradually developed a business model; rather, it was the exact opposite—first there was a strong commercial motive (saving a nearly bankrupt newspaper), then an extreme means was used to achieve that goal (“creating an unprecedented long-distance race”), and only over decades of development did sporting spirit, national identity, and cultural significance gradually accumulate.

This also offers something worth considering for organizers today who want to promote cycling, host local races, or organize challenge events: for an event to be sustainable in the long run, in addition to the competitive value of the sport itself, “narrative tension” and “mechanisms designed to sustain attention” are equally important. The Tour de France’s stage system, mountain showdowns, and the suspense of general classification comebacks are, in essence, carefully designed “storytelling mechanisms,” not just randomly generated race outcomes.

Extended Thoughts for Taiwanese Cycling Enthusiasts

• Understanding the commercial logic behind event design can help fans appreciate the dramatic tension of the race more deeply, rather than just watching who rides the fastest.
• The extreme race format of the early Tour de France reminds us: the modern emphasis on training recovery and nutrition strategies in sports science is a consensus formed through long-term evolution, not something taken for granted.
• Focus points for watching mountain stages: you can compare the gradients and distances of Taiwan’s long climbs (such as Wuling, Fengguizui, and the Beiyi Highway) to appreciate the physical exertion professional riders endure during consecutive days of climbing in the Alps or the Pyrenees.
• The formation of event culture takes time to accumulate: the Tour de France’s journey from a commercial marketing campaign to its current cultural status has spanned over a century of evolution, which also reminds local event organizers that brand and cultural identity require long-term cultivation.

Having traversed more than a century, the Tour de France has long since evolved from a marketing gamble to save newspaper sales into the most important annual event in global cycling. The next time you see riders sprinting fiercely on mountain roads in the broadcast, vying for the yellow jersey, perhaps you can think one layer deeper: behind this race route lies an entire history of media competition, the commercial instinct of a journalist-turned-rider, and over a century of competitive wisdom accumulated through countless rule adjustments.

Related Reading

• The Century-Old Legend of the Tour de France: From Newspaper Marketing to the World’s Greatest Sporting Event
• The Hundred-Year History of the Tour de France: A Glorious Journey from Its Founding to the Modern Era
• The Complete Tour de France Viewing Guide: Routes, Teams, Rules, and Highlights
• The Business Model of the Tour de France: Sponsorship Structure and Media Rights Analysis of a €1 Billion Event Brand